NTMS 2012 - Theory of Malware Diffusion in Wireless Communications Networks (NTMS Tutorial )

Abstract Malicious software (malware) has attracted significant attention, due to its impact on critical and/or widely employed infrastructures. The proposed tutorial (TMD-WCNet) will present theoretical background for modeling malware propagation in communication networks, especially wireless, with emphasis on the state-of-the-art approaches that have emerged in the last half-decade. The objective is to provide the audience a solid foundation on mathematical modeling techniques governing the spreading of malware through direct transmission links and also present several applications demonstrating these theoretical principles, which could be of potential interest in many different scientific fields as well. Starting from an elementary level and presenting approaches inspired from epidemiology, the tutorial will progress with more advanced mathematical tools, such as Queuing Theory, systems of Ordinary Differential Equations, Markov Random Fields and Game Theory, up to their application in malware propagation over communication networks and show how to utilize them for enhancing the infrastructures of the future. The tutorial will also include extensions of the presented theory to more general spreading processes, e.g. Information Dissemination Dynamics. The overall theory of malware diffusion is promising and capable of providing significant insight for dealing with more diverse processes that resemble the malware diffusion behavior. As such, TMD-WCNet will provide a sufficient toolbox for scientists and professionals that wish to become involved in the field of spreading (diffusion) processes, or further extend the field of malware propagation modeling.